The Anatomy Of A Viral Post

With a big assist from our Viral Dashboard (you have one too! use it!), here’s a case study of one of our most popular posts in the past month:Hipster Dinosaurs, by dino-hating BuzzFeeder IHateDinosaurs.

The Post Itself

IHateDinosaurs made this awesome, awesome, awesome post about Molly Lewis’s series of coloring book hipster dinosaurs on his Dino-themed BuzzFeed page earlier this month.

Mechanics Of Sharing

This was a good thing. Everyone in the world thinks that hipsters need to be taken down a peg. We are all like, “Hey, hipsters! Get some gears on your bike!” and, “I don’t really understand your T-shirt!”

Meanwhile, almost nobody hates dinosaurs - not even Tea Partiers. (We’ll leave I Hate Dinosaurs himself out of this for the time being. If he is racist against dinos, that is something between him and the great Brontosaurus in the Sky.)

This perfect confluence of awesome dinosaurs making fun of holier-than-thou hipsters was a good post that people responded to, so it took off like a dinosaur-powered fighter jet via social sharing.

For the first two weeks, the post started to gain steam on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites. People were even using good, old-fashioned ELECTRONIC SNAIL MAIL to send e-messages about the Hipster Dinosaurs to their grandchildren. 676 of them, to be precise!

Other Sites Take Notice

That’s when BoingBoing showed up and put some muscle behind it. BoingBoing’s post had two effects: 1) It sent an additional 11,000 pairs of eyeballs (or 22,000 one-eyed people) to the Hipster Dinosaurs (who were all, like, oh, shit, now our scene is being featured on BoingBoing. I’m not even all that into being a Hipster Dino anymore), and 2) it triggered a new round of sharing on Facebook.

Latecomers To The Party Search Using Google

Eventually, “Hipster Dinosaurs” became kind of a popular search term on Google, which was convenient, because IHateDinosaurs’ post has the number one result for that term. THE SNAKE IS EATING ITS OWN TAIL.

That’s pretty much it. All courtesy of an awesome post from a BuzzFeeder and some nifty analytics from the Viral Dashboard. “Nifty”? Really? Jesus. I am like 100 years old.